User Anonymous

first attempts at high hydration dough. A Question...

The first pic is a ciabatta style roll at 80% hydration, baked on a tray. The texture is fabulously open and full of holes. The second is a similar dough but about 95%. It is flatter and the texture, while entirely satisfactory, is less open with less holes. Is there an obvious reason for this. The 2nd bread was baked as a loaf in a cast iron pot.

8 comments

The first one looks especially nice. I have been reading through Hamelman's brilliant Bread - I can't find it at the moment, but I recall his comment somewhere that very high hydration (high 80%s) is over the top for ciabatta. So, maybe 90% is too high?

Hamelman has 3 ciabatta recipes (none SD) - and @ around 73-4% his hydration is relatively low for this type of bread, I would have thought. Just had a look at Reinhart's ciabatta (also not SD), and his is around 83%.

It looks like you may have over-developed your 90% hydration dough; and it looks a little under-proved - did you use cooler water? I also think generally that a less hydrated dough will 'stand up' better than a dough that is wetter - which will have a tendency to spread.

All ingredients in bread are expressed in percentages compared to the flour that is in the bread. The flour is always at 100% so if the hydration is 70% then the weight of water in the dough is the weight of the flour multiplied by 70%. Lets say you have the following flour weight.

Flour = 1,000 grams

Then for 70% hydration the water will be this.

Water = 700 grams.

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." Jim Elliot

I have a theory that if you over-hydrate your dough, you decrease the protein content (ie more water reduces the ratio of protein) thereby losing the strength of your gluten at 'such and such' a critical point of any particular flour.

I think sometime we blame over- or under-proving a dough for a problem that is caused by over- or under-hydrating a flour to make the dough.

I think it's good to write down your hydration figures for future reference, but don't get caught up in the idea that such and such an hydration will give you a perfect bread just because someone else's recipe said so.

Learn to recognise what your dough is telling you while you mix and knead it. I have 2 recipes for the one bread, a light rye, which are rather different. The hydration of one recipe is up to 92%, the other is 67 to 69%. This is to get a similar bread as the final product.